Can you Hire Like SpaceX?

If people are what make successful businesses, how far would you go to hire the best for your organisation? Pretty darn far I would imagine.
That is exactly what SpaceX is doing and it seems the company would spare no effort in their quest to recruit only the top Talent for their business, including risking their employer branding and reputation.
[bctt tweet=”What if you hire like #SpaceX?” username=”ATCevent”]
According to an ex-SpaceX employee, Josh Boehm, the company runs a “gauntlet” of an interview process that includes “multiple phone conversations and a full day of seven to eight hour-long interviews”. If the recruiter or hiring manager has any doubts about a candidate at any point during the process, they are required to stop the interview immediately and turn the candidate away.
Suffice to say, this doesn’t go down well with everyone and it has actually led to some “uncomfortable situations” Boehm said. It wouldn’t be too difficult, then, to see how candidates could be turned off by this brutal hiring process and give it the thumbs down.
However, surprisingly, this does not seem the case, judging by its impressive 4.4/5 Glassdoor ratings. There doesn’t seem to be any negative effect on the organisation’s overall attractiveness to candidates.
This begs the question – why? Not after all the debate on the importance of candidate experience to attracting top Talent and encouraging organisations to improve their application processes, surely SpaceX’s reputation as an employer of choice will take a hit and affect the organisation’s overall desirability?
Apparently not.
It would seem candidates are all too willing to overlook the arduous interview processes and the fact that they might be ditched any time, in exchange for the opportunity to work for one of the most innovative companies in the world. Or perhaps it is the halo-effect created by the company’s charismatic CEO Elon Musk that allows it to continuously get away with it.
[bctt tweet=”How can you hire like #SpaceX? Or should you even think about hiring like them?” username=”ATCevent”]
SpaceX’s hiring process may sound over the top, cruel even, but if you are on a mission to realise interplanetary living, can you really afford to spend any additional second on people who you know are not going to help you reach your target? Probably not.
Safe to say SpaceX will not be winning any candidate experience awards anytime soon, but you can almost bet on them hiring the very best Talent.
Which leads us to another question – can you do the same for your organisation? What if you hire like SpaceX? Or maybe the question you need to ask is whether you should be hiring like SpaceX?
What do you think?
Cover image: Getty Images


Talent Acquisition (TA) is on the cusp of a new wave of innovation and the 12th Australasian Talent Conference will be shining the light brightly on it – say hi to Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). Find out more.

Related articles

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Sign up to our newsletter

Get a weekly digest on the latest in Talent Acquisition.

Deliver this goodness to my inbox!